The Boy in the Shadows
by BitterSweetBee
Summary: Sometimes the dreams come to me all at once. I'll look outside my window and the city will be on fire. I stand there unable to move until it hits me. Then I wake up. - Set 160 years in the future in a world pillaged by war and disease.
1. Chapter 1

Sometimes the dreams come to me all at once. Most of the time they are all chopped up into little sections of him, falling and the end. But the nights where it happens all at once leave me the most restless.

He's been in my dreams ever since I can remember. Not a day goes by that I don't think of him. I fly through the night sky on a beautiful dragon. It's scales glow beautifully in the moonlight. It's serpent like body flows through the sky reacting gracefully to each gust of wind.

Then the dragons body begins to shake and the scales blow away and what's left in front of me is a normal human boy. He'll take my hands and smile at me and I can't help but smile back. Everything is so peaceful. These dreams are my favourite... but they leave me longing for him after I wake up.

Then the other dreams just spoil it all. It will start the same but when I am free falling with him we will be teared apart by a strong gust of wind. I'll reach out to him but he is too far away. I'll fall and fall until there is only darkness. Then I will hit the hard cold ground and I will find myself back in my room but something is wrong.

I'll look outside my window and the city will be on fire. The sky will be so filled with smoke that day is unrecognizable. I'll watch terrified as a large dark figure who stands over the city lets it's body fall. It will change as it falls into black waves that engulfs the city and destroys the buildings. I stand there unable to move until it hits me. Then I wake up.

**~The Boy in the Shadows~**

**~Spirited Away~**

"Mizuki?" I asked quietly as I walked into the room she had occupied in the hospital the last few months.

She looked up and smiled, "Hello Saaya." Her long beautiful auburn hair had long since fallen out and her face was sallow and sickly looking but the spark in her eye had yet to fade.

I smiled back but it wasn't visible from behind my medical mask, "How are you feeling?" I asked as I pulled a chair up next to her bed.

"Alright. We're still waiting for the results of the surgery. I feel better though."

"That's good to hear," I said relieved.

"I'm sorry I couldn't make it to your goodbye party. I got you something though! It's in my bag over there," she said pointing her finger in the direction of a chair near the window.

"You really didn't need to," I said getting her purse for her.

"Of course I did! I can't have you forgetting about me can I?" she exclaimed taking the purse from my hands and began ruffling through it. Before I could answer she exclaimed, "Ah! Here it is!" and pulled out a small book. She shoved it into my hands before I could refuse.

"God of the swift amber river..." I said reading the title. It was a children's fairy tale. Across the front a beautiful snake like dragon had been illustrated.

"I know it's silly, but when I saw it it reminded me so much of you. I had to get it," Mizuki said a blush beginning to grace her cheeks.

I looked up from the dragon that had me mesmerized the last few seconds, "No, I love it! You know me too well Mizuki," I smiled.

She smiled back but it soon faded, "So you're heading out today right?"

I could feel the corners of my lips droop, "Yeah."

The silence was unbearable and the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. It bothered me so much to see the tears running down her cheeks and the way she tried to wipe them away before I could notice. Everything was so wrong. Now was not the time to be leaving. Mizuki didn't need to feel anymore pain than she was already feeling. What terrible timing. She may have smiled and joked around before I left but that's how I will remember her. As that broken spirit. The fates were so cruel.

Now I'm sitting here at my desk. It's been three months since I moved back to Kyushu, my birth place. It's was the only island of Japan left not hit by the pandemic. We moved to Tokyo when I was little because of my fathers job. In the last two years it had been hit hardest out of all the other cities in the country and has been under quarantine since. It had taken my parents an enormous amount of money to pay for the testing that would validate us as uninfected in order to be able to move here, let alone get out of the city. My father was only making a third of the money he used to now but it didn't matter to any of us. Jobs aren't half as important as your health nowadays.

At that moment none of that occupied my mind, just the letter I held in my hands. I had been sitting there for forever reading it over and over. I couldn't believe what it said. I didn't want to either. It just wasn't plausible. But at that moment I knew it was true. Mizuki was dead. After months of fighting this disease it had finally killed her.

My hands shook and I couldn't breathe. I needed out. I pushed the chair out so hard it fell over and knocked down an unfinished painting in the middle of my room. It was a project I had never attempted before. The boy taking my hand and flying off into the night sky with me. It was the way my dreams had always ended when I was young. Now those dreams were becoming fewer and fewer and this frightened me. So I began to paint it in hopes of preserving the memory. As usual he was mesmerizing but everytime I tried to paint myself it never looked right, like my grown figure didn't belong beside his young one.

When I ran outside the rain burned my skin shaking me from my trance. I quickly backed up against the house and stood on the single cement step in front of the side door. The sheer amount of rain falling off the edge of the house looked like a water fall in front of me and splashed up in every direction and burnt my legs. I finally went inside and ran the red patches of my skin under cold water in the tub. I hadn't realized it was raining but at least now I had something that would keep my mind off things.

Sometimes my parents would tell me about the times when it was safe to go outside during rain storms. Before there had been so much pollution in the air and the rain had been water and not acid. She told me about snow too. Not exactly ice and not exactly water, but in between. It was so hard to imagine. When she showed me videos of her youth the stuff looked more like frosting to me. I couldn't imagine it actually being cold the way she explained.

Once the burning sensation had subsided into mild sting I turned the bath faucet off and dried my legs off. I would have liked to keep them under water but lately we had even more limited rations than usual. I hadn't followed the news much lately but I assumed that it was because Canada had raised the prices of it's fresh water again.

When Mom got home and saw me holding ice packs to my raw skin a look of agitation graced her face but turned to shock when I started crying.

"Oh Saaya," she quickly kicked of her boots and carefully discarded her acid soaked jacket and umbrella before taking off her rain gloves. She came and sat by my side and pulled me against her, "What is it honey?"

I fumbled with my words for a few moments not able to hold back my sobs. Finally I forced the words out of my mouth, "Mizuki's dead."

"Oh baby..." she hugged me tighter, "I'm so sorry."

She knew how much Mizuki had meant to me. We had been friends since our first year of Junior high school, when we met at cram school. We had shared our birthdays together as they had only been a week apart and she'd had come on many of our family vacations since my father could afford it. We were barely apart. Until she had got sick that is. Then the amount of time I was allowed to see her dwindled until it was limited only to monthly scheduled visits to the hospital.

My mother sat with me until I calmed down then she insisted on letting her put aloe on the patches of skin that were still red. After that she was back in wife mode and began preparing dinner. It was alright, I wanted to be alone anyway so I went to my room.

All around my room pictures of Mizuki and myself graced the walls. We were all ages in these photos. Along with the pictures, posters and my paintings took up a vast majority. Mostly I painted dragons. I used to paint him a lot as well until my parents began to question me about him. Few pictures of him hung on my wall. They were my favourites.

I picked up the painting I had knocked over earlier and placed it back on the painting stand before I sat down on my bed and began to wallow in sadness once again. I took one picture from the wall at the head of my bed. It was of me and Mizuku at an arts festival. We both held up the painting we had collaborated together on. She also held up the second place ribbon we had been awarded with. Huge smiles were plastered on our faces. We had been in our first year of highschool then. It wasn't long after that that she had got sick.

I sighed, flopped down on my back and placed the picture on my night stand. It wasn't fair that she died. There were so many other people in the world. Why her? Why not someone evil and manipulative. Like that guy in Australia who had massacred all those people for being religious. Or maybe even that nasty woman on the television all the time that said they should euthanize all the people who were sick in order to stop the spreading of the disease. I hated her. I couldn't understand how someone could be so selfish. Then again, would I think that way if someone close to me hadn't been infected? I liked to think that I wouldn't.

All that crying had made me tired and I slept for a good seven hours. I woke up hungry and when I went down stairs to make myself something to eat I found that my mother had left me a dish from dinner and had wrapped plastic wrap over the top. I pulled it out, grabbed a pair of chopsticks and walked out to the patio. I set my plate down on the outside table and began to eat.

It smelled like cleaning chemicals because of the storm earlier. I kind of liked the smell but my parents hated it. Mom said that when she was younger everything smelled fresh and clean after rain. Now the rain did anything but. It killed vegetation and the animals that tried to eat it afterwards. The only plants left in the wild were the ones that were able to withstand it. All others were preserved in mass green houses. That's where crops were grown now too. I had been to one on a school trip when I was little. It smelled really nice. Apparently that's the way forests used to smell.

It was a pretty night. It was dry out by now and that clouds had cleared. The only thing that lit up the sky was the stars as there was no moon.

"Night of the new moon," I breathed wistfully.

* * *

><p><strong>This story is set in 150 years in the future in 2161. Not much has changed since now. No flying cars or people living on mars. Just little things. Also, Mizuki means beautiful moon, which explains the ending to this chapter. No, I am not one of those people who only chooses names with meanings that are interpreted into the story, I assure you. I've had this story in my head for quite some time. It was inspired by my favourite Spirited Away fanfiction, Lost in the Fog by Inner Dementia. It's in my favourites if anyone is interested. Yes I spell words like colour and favourite with a u. I'm Canadian and that's how we roll. Haterz gonna hate! I hoped you enjoyed and thanks for reading :)<strong>


	2. Chapter 2

I began poking my rice around the bowl. I wasn't terribly fond of rice unless it was smothered in yellow sauce but we were out. I plucked a bit up with my chopsticks and popped it in my mouth before I could have second thoughts. A shudder went down my spine and I tried to swallow three times before managing to get it down. Like eating glue.

"Bleh," I stuck my tounge out and pushed my food away. I decided to go for a walk. Nights after rain were the best to go for walks because you didn't have to worry about being attacked by animals or weirdos because they were either dead or hiding from the rain.

It was arguable whether or not it was safer since if you disturbed your surroundings too much, you ran the risk of accidentally having a tree full of acid dumped on you. Either that or you could breath in too many fumes and suffocate. Or perhaps faint and fall into a puddle of the stuff and have your lungs enflame and close up while the acid eats away at skin and bone. I thought I had enough common sense not to do any of the above though, and besides, most of the people you saw on the news who had died that way were either crazy hobos or intoxicated college students.

I put on my yellow rainboots and jacket fearing that I might stumble across a puddle in the dark though. I grabbed a dust mask from the coat hanger at the front door and put it on before going on my merry way. Scratch the merry, I was still feeling extremely depressed.

The bleach smell mixed with the smell of the woods reminded me of pine car fresheners. The sudden humidity of the pines always caught me by surprise. Their purple needles almost blended with the darkness. I sloshed through the muddy areas in disgust to avoid the puddles knowing that too much exposure would disintegrate the plastic soles of my shoes.

The trees stood high above my head. Most were rotten and fallen over, making way for new life. The chemicals in the rain and the air sped up the process of nature. While this was good for agriculture it also cause the forest to spread into the city, although it was not visible to the naked eye.

Every five years I would hear my father moan about having to get someone in about digging up the roots that were causing damage to the walls of the basement. A network of mutated roots lay beneath the ground you walked on. You didn't think about it much until you went back to school after summer break to find a mini forest had grown in your gymnassium through the cracks the pressure of the growth had created in the floor.

That had happened when I was in fourth grade. Considering that was the year we started doing track, gym really blew. We now had to do it outside with all the heat waves that kept getting worse year after year. The city had finally had to make deals with local gyms and rec centers after two kids fainted from heat exhaustion.

As I wove deeper the heat became denser and denser and the smell grew stronger and stronger. I felt at home here in nature, despite how mutated it had become. I thought that it was neat that no matter what humans threw at the enviroment, the enviroment would always adapt. With barely any water for the plants to live on the plants had learned to break down the acid rain to survive. Now instead of their leaves being green and their trunks being brown the forest was filled with different hues of purples.

When I came to a clearing I stopped and examined the night sky. I counted constellations and recalled ones that were no longer visible. I hadn't seen the big dipper in years and only the handle was left of the little one. Scientists estimated that as the world got closer to being completely covered by cities and greenhouses, light pollution would block out the stars to the naked eye completly. While my attention was drawn to the sky the tree above me rustled causing a droplet to fall on my cheek.

I flinched and ripped my mask off to brush it away with my sleeve. Another rustle brought my attention back up again. My eyes widened as they held a the yellow eyes of a Blue Viper hovering on the branch above, in their vision. It was a cross species of a Serval, a large African feline with a long neck and legs and the rare Japanese Wildcat, which many clones and mutations were made on as it edged closer to extinction. This cross breeds fur had become a bluish silver over the centuries from exposure to the elements. It had long claws, was extremely fast and _very_ dangerous.

I ducked out of the way as it jumped down at me. My mask went flying from my hand and landed in a puddle and sizzled a bit before dissapearing. I landed in a clump of mud an leaves and rolled onto my back just to see it lunge at me again right before a large serpant crashed into it head first. As the viper crashed into a tree and cried out as the acid that shook down burned it's skin, the serpent glided over circling it's body around mine, it's eyes, glowing alabaster in anger, never breaking from the felines.

I whimpered as it drew close to me. From this close I could see that how fair and almost like pearls in their design it's scales were. A long jade mane graced it's back from head to tail and ended in a tuft. Four long skinny legs protruded from it's body and ended in long, sharp talons. A pair of long horns and whiskers, ten times the length of the previous, thrust out from the fur on it's head, which was almost wolf like in feature. It's jowls pulled back in a snare revealing all the long sharp teeth hidden underneith. I gasped as I realized this was no serpant, it was a dragon.

The Viper rebounded quickly from the ground and hissed at it's enemy.

I watched in awe as the dragon returned the favour and lunged forward once again.

**It's crazy that it's been over a year since I've updated this. I never meant to put it on hiatus, it just sort of happened. Blame writers block I guess. I have the mojority of the plot worked through in my head. It's just all the little connecting things that get me. Random stuff usually inspires me, places, images, music, etc. So if you're interested in seeing this story continue and you see something that reminds you of it, don't hesitated to PM. I'll appretiate it. I also appreciate constructive critism if anyone is willing to take the time to write their thoughts on this peice down.**


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